Map applications are commonly known in the art. These applications commonly run on a desktop or laptop computer and a user may get information about the route to travel, such as streets, between a starting point and end point or simply the size and appearance of a city or region from space.
In particular, a map showing streets or even buildings of a certain region may also indicate sights or other places of interest, such as restaurants, theaters, gas stations, etc. in the region shown on the map. Furthermore, short cuts may be provided to websites which provide more information or pictures of the sight indicated on the map.
With increasing computing power, such map applications may also be used in mobile devices, such as car navigation equipment. For example, navigation software of car navigation equipment may indicate to a driver certain places of interest, which are passed on the road.
Currently, places of interest shown by a map application are often indicated by a symbol that may in some cases contain a link to obtain more information.
A map application for mobile phones that provides additional information about a certain location is for example the Loclet™ application introduced by Sony Ericsson, which lets a user browse location based content in his/her mobile phone. In order to do so, the application has to obtain data of the location of the mobile phone. The obtained location data may represent the geographical position of the mobile phone and may be obtained by the mobile phone using different means. It may use a built-in GPS device, similar to a navigation system in a car, or cell tower information to find the position of the mobile phone to be displayed on a map. Various methods such as time of arrival detection or time difference of arrival detection are known in the art of telecommunications to obtain location data indicating the position of a mobile phone.
It is feasible that the map application alerts a user as soon as the user is in the vicinity of an interesting subject, e.g. a cathedral, if the user is interested in churches. However, such a feature may easily lead to an information overload of the user since the user has no direct control of when or how often content is provided to him/her by the map application. For example, the user may be bothered if content, such as information about a particular church, is repeatedly provided every time the user passes this church.
On the other hand, if the map application, in particular a content provision application that may be a part of the map application, has to be started manually by the user to browse available location based content, places of interest to the user may be missed, since the user may not expect or realize that there are interesting subjects in the vicinity.
Therefore, the possibility of finding unexpected places of interest is reduced.